FeedMeSomePi

A tiny RSS aggregator built for Raspberry Pi Zero and up, running 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS (Bullseye / Bookworm Lite or Desktop). Runs happily on a Pi Zero W with 512 MB RAM — Tkinter for the UI, feedparser for parsing, and a JSON file on disk for feed storage.

Features

• Add feeds by pasting a URL — no OPML importer, no cloud sync, no telemetry.
• Refresh button force-refetches every feed (bypassing ETag / If-Modified-Since caching) so it really pulls fresh content; the background timer still does polite conditional GETs every 15 minutes.
• Full-text articles — when a feed only ships an excerpt, the app fetches the article URL on click and runs Readability-style extraction (via readability-lxml, à la FiveFilters Full-Text RSS) to pull the main body. Cached back to articles.json so it happens once per article.
• Article list with title, source, published-at, and an inline preview pane.
• Image thumbnails are downscaled and compressed to keep RAM use flat.
• Notification chime is a tiny bundled WAV (~2 KB) played via aplay.
• Reader-mode preview strips scripts and inline styles for a clean read.
• Feed store lives in ~/.feedmesomepi/feeds.json; article cache in articles.json — delete either to reset.

Install (on the Pi)

git clone https://github.com/eagnespuerto/FeedMeSomePi.git
cd FeedMeSomePi
./setup.sh

setup.sh installs the two system packages the app needs (python3-tk, python3-pil.imagetk), sets up a virtualenv, installs feedparser + requests, and drops a desktop entry into ~/.local/share/applications/ so FeedMeSomePi shows up under Internet in the PiOS menu. On a Pi Zero the whole thing takes a couple of minutes.

Run

Click Internet → FeedMeSomePi in the PiOS menu, or from a terminal:

./run.sh

Or, if you prefer to activate the venv yourself:

. .venv/bin/activate
python3 rss_aggregator.py

Adding a feed

Paste a feed URL into the box at the top and hit Add. If the URL is a site homepage rather than a feed, the app tries the common autodiscovery paths (/feed, /rss, /atom.xml, and <link rel="alternate"> tags in the HTML) before giving up.

Uninstall the menu entry

./uninstall.sh

Leaves the venv, saved feeds, and article cache in place. Delete the repo directory and ~/.feedmesomepi/ for a full wipe.

Why the constraints

Pi Zero (single-core ARM11, 512 MB) sets the ceiling. Everything in this repo is chosen to fit under it:

• Tkinter ships with Raspberry Pi OS — no Qt/GTK download, no Electron.
• JSON storage — no SQLite dependency; the feed list is tiny.
• Text-only article cache — parsed article metadata (title, summary text, link, published, seen) is persisted to ~/.feedmesomepi/articles.json so the app opens with content instantly and background refresh is delta-only. Audio enclosures and full-size images are never stored; thumbnails live separately as small JPEGs.
• Compressed assets — thumbnails are resized to 96×96 with PIL and cached to disk; the notify sound is a mono 8-bit WAV.
• Background refresh runs on a single worker thread with a cap on concurrent requests so we don't thrash the CPU. ETag / If-Modified-Since conditional GETs avoid re-downloading unchanged feeds altogether.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.